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Yaphit
Yaphit is a Gelatin Lieutenant and Engineer aboard the [[USS Orville|USS Orville]]. According to Admiral Halsey, Yaphit was already an engineer "for years" on the Orville prior to the arrival of Ed Mercer as captain.Episode 1x01: Old WoundsJohn LaMarr. Episode 2x14: The Road Not Taken In April, 2420, Yaphit is passed over for promotion to Chief Engineer of the Orville, for which he was considered next in line, in favor of Navigator John LaMarr. Yaphit is known for an overbearing crush on Doctor Claire Finn that culminated in a short-lived relationship when Claire was under the influence of Retepsian pheromones. Yaphit's voice is provided by Norm Macdonald, who also portrays his human form. Biography Early Life Much of Yaphit's past prior to joining the Orville is unknown. Yaphit was "born" and raised on an unnamed home world. The way Yaphit came into being was somewhat convoluted. His mother created a novel Gelatin being via mitosis and, later, the novel gelatin split via mitosis into Yaphit and his brother. Episode 1x11: New Dimensions Yaphit enlisted as an officer in the Planetary Union once he reached adulthood. He served "for years" on the Orville under an unnamed captain and later under Captain Ed Mercer. Career For most of his tenure aboard the Orville, Yaphit works directly under Chief Engineer Steve Newton in Engineering. By measure of experience, Yaphit is the seniormost engineer of the ship, aside from Newton himself, and is considered next in line for promotion to chief engineer when Newton leaves in April 2420. To Yaphit's dismay, that promotion would never come. When Commander Kelly Grayson discovers that Navigator LaMarr boasts some of the highest performance scores in Union history, she becomes John's strongest advocate. She convinces Captain Ed Mercer to place John at the head of a joint Science and Engineering task force to research a nearby spatial anomaly. Yaphit quickly picks up that John is being tested for Chief Engineer - otherwise Yaphit would be in charge of the task force. He files a complaint with Captain Mercer, claiming discrimination against gelatinous persons. Meanwhile, the spatial anomaly turns out to be a pocket of two-dimensional space. With enemy Krill destroyers advancing from all sides, Yaphit comes up with the idea to escape into two-dimensional space by placing the Orville inside a quantum bubble that preserves three dimensions inside. While the plan initially works, but the "aperture" allowing the Orville to exit two-dimensional space closes early, leaving the ship stranded inside the spatial anomaly. Worse yet, the Orville is unable to preserve the quantum bubble. John convinces the Captain to project the bubble from a shuttle, and the shuttle would tow the Orville to a new distant aperture to return to normal space. John's plan works brilliantly. Unfortunately, the crisis could not have come at a worse time in Yaphit's career. His idea to enter two-dimensional space was perceived as a mistake by the rest of Engineering, and sharply criticized. Even though John defends Yaphit by saying that he approved Yaphit's idea, and thus shares responsibility, Ed promotes John to Chief Engineer as soon as they return to normal space. Conflict and relationship with Claire Finn Since Doctor Claire Finn's arrival at the Orville, Engineer Yaphit develops a profound romantic interest in her, often singing to her with a guitar or giving her gifts. After all, Yaphit prefers sexually and romantically Human women of color.Yaphit to Pria: "You know, this may sound blunt, but you are the only white woman I've ever found attractive." Episode 1x05: Pria Claire, on the other hand, finds Yaphit's persistent wooing to be uncomfortable and annoying. In November, 2419, Yaphit begins feigning illness as an excuse to meet Claire in Sick Bay and ask her out on a date, which he attempts three times over the span of a week. After she turns him down, he makes a crude, sexual pass, after which she angrily demands he leave.Episode 1x03: About a Girl His persistence grates on Claire, eventually threatening to file a formal complaint.Claire threatens to file a formal complaint if he doesn't stop his inappropriate displays of unrequited affection. Episode 1x09: Cupid's Dagger In January, 2420, Yaphit learns that Doctor Finn's shuttle did not arrive as scheduled at Arboreus Prime, distressing Yaphit to know the object of his affections has gone missing. Claire's shuttle was damaged after a trip through an uncharted spatial anomaly and she is forced to crash-land on a nearby moon. Yaphit urges LaMarr not to get them lost as John leaves to search for her using star charts in lieu of the navigational array. Claire is later rescued.Episode 1x08: Into the Fold A month later, Yaphit tries once again to woo Doctor Finn, and she rejects him - further insisting she will file a complaint if his unwanted advances continue. However, Yaphit had bumped into Darulio on his way to see Claire. Unbeknownst to Yaphit and Claire, Darulio, a Retepsian, produced powerful pheromones that sparks sexual attraction between carrier and recipient. Yaphit transmitted the pheromones to Claire, creating a powerful romantic and sexual interest in Claire towards Yaphit.Episode 1x09: Cupid's Dagger Claire and Yaphit begin a sexual relationship lasting several days until the pheromones wear off. During that time, Claire grows increasingly obsessed with the Engineer, which becomes dangerous during the Navarian-Bruidian conflict. Claire detains Yaphit at gunpoint from erecting a special barrier between the Navarian and Bruidian war fleets. Claire avoids punishment as she was under the overwhelming influence of alien pheromones, but Yaphit leaves Claire alone after the incident. Kaylon conflict After the Orville was commandeered by the Kaylon, Yaphit provided a crucial role in taking the ship back and defeating them. As the crew were held captive in the Shuttle Bay, the gelatinous Lieutenant was entrusted by Commander Grayson to navigate an access conduit, only half a meter wide, which led him to the armory. Finding a single Kaylon standing guard, Yaphit distracted it by tossing aside a metal bolt, allowing him to claim a PM-488 Titan. After terminating the Kaylon guard, Yaphit returned to the Shuttle Bay, handing the gun to Commander Grayson, who in turn gave it to Second Officer Bortus, who used it to terminate the two Kaylon guarding the Shuttle Bay. In the time it took for reinforcements to arrive, LaMarr and Keyali were able to open the Shuttle Bay doors, allowing Grayson and Malloy to escape the ship in Shuttle 1, proceeding to enlist the aid of the Krill. With only two minutes before additional Kaylon arrived in the Shuttle Bay, Captain Mercer entrusted Yaphit to use the conduit to access the communications array, where he was to send a message to Union Central without being detected. Ty Finn, who was small enough to navigate the access conduit, volunteered to join Yaphit, as he needed someone to scramble his frequency to mask his work. Though Claire protested against her son's life being endangered, Yaphit assured her that he would do everything he could to keep him safe. Upon making it to the communications array, Yaphit instructed Ty to punch in random frequencies as he transmitted the message to Union Central. Unfortunately, the pair were interrupted by a pair of Kaylon. Attempting to cover Ty's escape, Yaphit physically assaulted one Kaylon by entering its body, only for the other Kaylon to capture Ty while Yaphit was incapacitated. However, Yaphit was successful in getting the message to Union Central, resulting in the fleet being assembled for the Battle of Earth. Thankfully, Isaac later saved Ty as he turned against the other Kaylon, deactivating himself as well as all the Kaylon aboard the ship. Following the Union's victory at Earth, Yaphit, having almost been "fried" and put "out of commission for a bit", eventually recovered and entered Sick Bay. Recalling that he got a good look at the Kaylon's "guts", Yaphit suggested that he could jump-start Isaac's inert body by connecting the right pathways. Ultimately, Isaac was successfully revived by Yaphit.Episode 2x09: Identity, Pt. 2 Honor Over a month following the Battle of Earth, a special ceremony is held in Yaphit's honor in the Mess Hall where Captain Mercer, with the authority vested in him by the Planetary Union, presented the Lieutenant with the Sapphire Star medal for extraordinary heroism beyond the call of duty during the Kaylon conflict. Some time later, LaMarr requested a conduit buffer cap from Yaphit in engineering only to find that he was absent. A crewman suggested that he had gone to the bathroom''Episode 2x10: Blood of Patriots'' In engineering, Yaphit assisted LaMarr and Malloy in restoring a mobile phone taken from the 2015 Saratoga Springs time capsule. He suggested getting in "through the back door" by running a decorrelation algorithm on the secondary memory cache, only for LaMarr to reveal that he already tried and failed. LaMarr then got the idea to use launch "old school binary input filter," which granted access to the data within, but with an unresponsive keypad. Yaphit then suggested turning the phone off and on again, which completely restored the device, revealing it to have been donated by a Laura Huggins.Episode 2x11: Lasting Impressions Yaphit was among those who attended the simulated night club program created by the temporally displaced Lieutenant Grayson. His enthusiastic dancing was pointed out by Captain Mercer.Episode 2x13: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Alternate timeline In an alternate timeline where Mercer, Grayson and Claire never served aboard the Orville, Yaphit still served alongside Lieutenant LaMarr for years, under Captain Griffith. Among those who made it to the escape pods, Yaphit survived the disastrous Battle of Earth, which ended with the Kaylon purging the Earth of all life and the Orville being lost in the depths of the planet's ocean. Yaphit later joined a Union resistance cell led by "the Lieutenant", Alara Kitan. Just less than nine months later, Yaphit was at the resistance base when they were visited by the scavenger ship crew. Yaphit answered the door to John LaMarr, who he initially failed to remember, explaining that a piece of him had been blasted of last week and a little bit of his memory was in it. Soon after, the resistance base was attacked by Kaylon ground forces, forcing John and the others to escape while the resistance attempted to fight off the attackers. Ultimately, Dr. Finn was successfully transported to the past, where she performed the alteration necessary to restore history and eliminate the alternate timeline.Episode 2x14: The Road Not Taken Production From the outset, creator Seth MacFarlane wanted "utterly non-human" aliens for the show to more realistically portray futuristic, sentient life."How Seth MacFarlane Got Charlize Theron To Be On 'The Orville' | SDCC 2017 | Entertainment Weekly". Entertainment Weekly. July 26, 2017. "It's a sci-fi show," he explained in July, 2017. "And budgetary constraints mandate that sci-fi characters be humanoid. But if you talk to physicists they'll tell you, 'It's most likely nothing will look like a human if we find life in space.'" MacFarlane named Yaphit after actor Yaphet Kotto. Kotto starred as Mr. Kananga in the James Bond film Live and Let Die, which MacFarlane watched while writing the pilot script.@SethMacFarlane. "You got me. I watched Live and Let Die while I was writing the pilot.". Twitter. June 16, 2018. Kotto also stars in the 1979 movie Alien . In the original script, Yaphit is described merely as a gelatinous blob with a "sloppy hole of a mouth."MacFarlane, Seth. The Orville 1x01 - Pilot. Fox. MacFarlane sketched the character of Yaphit on paper, which was fleshed out by Howard Berger. According to executive producer Jason Clark, "MacFarlane wanted to know if we could feature a CGI character that is essentially a gelatinous blob with a sloppy mouth hole."Bond, Jeff. The World of the Orville. Titan Books. 2018. Pg. 67. Armed with MacFarlane and Berger's designs, Clark approached Tippett Studios to turn the drawing into a fully-fledged, renderable model. Once Tippett's model of Yaphit was ready to be used, visual effects supervisor Luke McDonald made a 3-D printing of Yaphit for final approval. Unfortunately, the budgetary concerns that limit other science fiction shows eventually limited The Orville, and Yaphit became prohibitively expensive due to computer rendering costs. "Yaphit looks good on paper," MacFarlane later recalled. "But when you write this character every week, it starts to become expensive, so you write him back a bit.""Seth Meyers Explains to Seth MacFarlane Why People Resent Him". Late Night with Seth Meyers. Sept. 8, 2017. Casting Norm Macdonald as Yaphit was remarkably easy and, it appears, without auditions. MacFarlane called Macdonald and asked, "Norm, you want to be a blob?" To which Macdonald replied, "Hell yeah, I'll be a blob." MacFarlane called the casting process a "ten-second phone call" with Macdonald. Propmaster Bryan Rodgers places a microphone where Yaphit will be added during editing so that actors have an idea of where to look.Bryan Rodgers self-identifies in this interview. Owen, Rob. "Tuned In: Seth MacFarlane readies his own ‘Star Trek’". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Aug. 7, 2017. The item is identified by Penny Johnson Jerald as a microphone in a separate interview. See Jordan DesJardines, "NYCC 2017: What’s Up Doc? Penny Johnson Jerald Talks ‘The Orville’", ScienceFiction.com (Oct. 13, 2017). A second object, also made by Rodgers, was a more lifelike wooden model of Yaphit that would be dragged by crewmembers on a skateboard so that actors could get a sense of the creature's physical form prior to filming."The Orville Fan Podcast w/ Bryan Rodgers (23)". Planetary Union Network. Dec. 6, 2018. At Jerald's request, an object was not used for scenes between Claire and Yaphit."Penny Johnson Jerald #TheOrville on #FOX interviewed at 35th #PaleyFestLA TV Festival in Hollywood". Red Carpet Report on Mingle Media TV. March 17, 2018. The item is identified by Jerald as a microphone in a separate interview. See Jordan DesJardines, "NYCC 2017: What’s Up Doc? Penny Johnson Jerald Talks ‘The Orville’", ScienceFiction.com (Oct. 13, 2017). Meanwhile, MacDonald spoke his lines from a corner of the studio to the actors while filming.DesJardines, Jordan. "NYCC 2017: What’s Up Doc? Penny Johnson Jerald Talks ‘The Orville’". ScienceFiction.com. Oct. 13, 2017. Trivia * Yaphit's original quarters were supposed to be in the scaffolding of Engineering.Bond, Jeff. The World of the Orville. Titan Books. 2018. Pg. 71. *Yaphit is sexually attracted to Human women, but strongly prefers non-white women such as Doctor Claire Finn and the engineer Celeste.Episode 1.5x03: The Word of Avis, Pt. 1 In fact, the only white woman he ever finds attractive is Pria Lavesque.Episode 1x05: Pria *During table reads, Yaphit's lines are read by executive producer David A. Goodman."PLANETARY UNION NETWORK: EPISODE 26". Planetary Union Network. Jan. 13, 2019. *Yaphit is the only character to have entered onscreen into other characters, namely Bortus and Isaac--Bortus to retrieve part of himself that was eaten during the course of a practical joke perpetrated by Gordon and John; then to restart Isaac after he had deactivated himself and the other Kaylons aboard the Orville to free the ship. Appearances *''Episode 2x03: Home'' *''Episode 2x06: A Happy Refrain'' *''Episode 2x07: Deflectors'' *''Episode 2x09: Identity, Pt. 2'' *''Episode 2x10: Blood of Patriots'' *''Episode 2x11: Lasting Impressions'' *''Episode 2x13: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow'' *''Episode 2x14: The Road Not Taken'' }} Notes References Category:Characters Category:Orville Crew